A Peninsula of a Thousand City-States

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Unification took as long as it did partly because Italy before 1861 was never one political thing to unify. Florence, Milan, Venice and Rome had spent centuries as the seats of genuinely separate, often rival powers: the Republic of Florence and later the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; the Duchy of Milan, fought over repeatedly by French, Spanish and Austrian claimants; the Republic of Venice, an independent maritime power for over a thousand years until Napoleon ended it in 1797; and Rome, governed directly by the Pope as the capital of the Papal States. Each had its own currency, its own laws, its own army and often its own foreign alliances, and the wealth and rivalry among them produced the Renaissance as much as any single national culture did. The Risorgimento that Cavour and Garibaldi led in the 1850s and 1860s was not simply expelling foreign rulers, though Austria controlled the northeast and Spain and France had ruled parts of the south for centuries; it was persuading city-states and kingdoms with genuinely different histories that they were one nation at all, a persuasion Italian regional identity and dialect still show the limits of today.